BusyBox
BusyBox combines tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable. It provides minimalist replacements for most of the utilities you usually find in GNU fileutils, shellutils, etc. The utilities in BusyBox generally have fewer options than their full-featured GNU cousins; however, the options that are included provide the expected functionality and behave very much like their GNU counterparts. BusyBox provides a fairly complete POSIX environment for any small or embedded system.
| Tags | Boot Init Software Development Embedded Systems |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPL |
| Operating Systems | POSIX Linux |
| Implementation | C |
Recent releases
- 29 Oct 2008 05:17
No changes have been submitted for this release.
- 18 Apr 2008 14:03
Changes: Enhancements and bugfixes.
- 22 May 2007 00:49
Changes: This release fixes bugs in hdparm, hush, ifupdown, ps, and sed.
- 27 Mar 2007 07:36
Changes: This releases brings new features, improvements, and bugfixes for many applets.
- 29 Jan 2007 06:18
Changes: This release has a CONFIG_DESKTOP option which enables features needed for busybox usage on a desktop machine. For example, several less frequently used options are enabled in find, chmod, and chown, and od is significantly bigger but matches GNU coreutils. It is intended to eventually make busybox a viable alternative for "standard" utilities for slightly adventurous desktop users.
- All comments
Recent commentsRe: Problem with busybox as init
> I've been making my own
> bootdisk/minilinux. I use busybox, and I
> dont have initd, so the kernel is
> started with "init=/bin/sh" where sh is
> a link to busybox (yes, i compiled sh
> into bb). But when the system boots,
> busybox prints out its list of functions
> and quits! This results to "kernel
> panic: tried to kill init"
> help would be appreciated :)
> cheers,
> J
This is the result of a kernel bug where the kernel fails to properly set the value of argv[0] for init to /bin/sh. I got a patch into 2.4.23, and 2.6.0-preX fixing this bug, so this will now work properly with the latest Linux kernels.
-Erik
Re: Problem with busybox as init
Got hush to boot, but it only displays the "hush - humble shell... blah blah blah" text and doesnt display a prompt or respond to commands
The shell works when i execute it from my normal linux... wierd?
cheers,
J
Problem with busybox as init
I've been making my own bootdisk/minilinux. I use busybox, and I dont have initd, so the kernel is started with "init=/bin/sh" where sh is a link to busybox (yes, i compiled sh into bb). But when the system boots, busybox prints out its list of functions and quits! This results to "kernel panic: tried to kill init"
help would be appreciated :)
cheers,
J